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About Us Mission and Purpose This web site is designed to assist teachers of middle grades and secondary level history and social science programs in their handling of religion as curricular subject matter. The hope is to facilitate instructional endeavors that will, regarding religion, nourish in students a demeanor and civic understanding that is conducive to public civility and religious pluralism. Appropriately conducted, public education about religion can be helpful to our achieving a nation where citizens of diverse worldviews can live their lives side-by-side in harmony. Inappropriately conducted studies about religion, however, not only will fail to achieve these worthwhile ends, but run counter to them. |
Teaching About Religion |
in support of civic pluralism |
______ A Civic Mandate for Teachers Public schools exist to serve all U.S. youth and to equip them as future citizens. The citizenry rightly expects that academic study about religion in public schools will be fully in accord with our nation’s civic promise to its diverse citizenry. ¯¯¯¯¯ |
It is important that youngsters understand that religious liberty is not only for them and for those who think or believe like them, but also for fellow citizens who have different understandings. Within civil law, everyone has religious freedom. It must be guarded even — perhaps especially — for those whose thinking and traditions are unconventional or unfamiliar. We look to our schools to foster in students an attitude that is respectful of a citizen’s right to liberty of conscience. Specifically, a teacher who is teaching about religion can use site material to better: 1. Encourage students toward open-minded and objective consideration of the diverse worldviews they may study in history, and the varied forms of “different believing” that they may encounter in their own life and times. Note: This educational undertaking is an inclusive one, in that it incorporates the nonreligious worldview along with the spectrum of religious world views. (For elaboration, see the site's Rationale) 2. Help students to appreciate those aspects of our American heritage that safeguard individual freedom of conscience. Support and Personnel This site is supported by OABITAR, (Objectivity, Accuracy, and Balance In Teaching About Religion), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. One distinct aim of OABITAR is to seek the addition of nonreligion to public school curricula which include instruction about religion, for the purposes of achieving objectivity, accuracy, and balance. The overarching goal is one of promoting academic integrity and a constitutionally sound position of religious neutrality apropos to public education in the United States. The website was developed and is maintained by Instructional Systems, Sacramento, California. This company’s prior curriculum project for OABITAR resulted in the supplemental instructional module for grades 6-12, Different Drummers: Nonconforming Thinkers in History.) Curriculum consultants for and leading developers of this website are Dr. Paul Geisert and Dr. Mynga Futrell. Drs. Geisert and Futrell have been classroom teachers and teacher educators, and they most recently authored the college textbook, Teachers, Computers, and Curriculum: Using Microcomputers in the Classroom, 3rd Ed. [published by Allyn and Bacon, 2000], and the module of supplemental instructional materials, Different Drummers: Nonconforming Thinkers in History [published by Trafford Publishing, 1999]. The website’s religion consultant is Dr. Gerald A. Larue, Emeritus Professor of Biblical History and Archaeology and an Adjunct Professor of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. Professor. Larue is the author of many books, among them the text, Freethought Across the Centuries: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment [published by the Humanist Press, 1996]. |